razib | January 19, 2006We are all aware of Darwin, but the men who were instrumental in the rise of the Modern Synthesis and the banishment of the Eclipse of Darwinism are not figures who loom large in the public imagination. In the domain of population genetics they would be R.A Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane and Sewall Wright. R.A. Fisher's daughter wrote a good biography that chronicles his private and public life, Life of a Scientist. Statistically oriented people will be particularly interested his conflict with Jerzy Neyman. Will Provine's Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology is probably the most…
razib | January 18, 2006Many people have been revisiting old posts so that new readers could get a "taste" of their blog. Below are some representative posts which span my varied interests....
Daughter of the Enlightenment, Journey of Men, The Germanization of the liberal Idea, 8th grade math for the rest of us, Gene expression might matter, Slow and diverse food, Up to medievalism, Theological incorrectness, The madrassa & me, Way of the Hui, Taste & behavior genetics, Dissolving the dominance of dominance , Beyond the Punnett Square, part n, Extremism in defense of precision is no vice and The gods of the…
razib | January 17, 2006This is more the territory of Cognitive Daily, but I think I want to offer a possibility as to why Science Blogs is bio-heavy, as RPM observed. I think it is because biology is a science which intersects with intuitive cognitive biases we naturally exhibit as humans. I am suggesting that perhaps a content specific element is at work so that our folk psychology and folk biology perks up when biology wanders into their input domains. Now, there is a folk physics, but cutting edge (ergo, bloggable) scientific physics is so advanced and abstractly removed from our intuitive understanding of…
razib | January 17, 2006Via RPM I see that Chad at Uncertain Principles is asking about seminal discoveries and experiments in biology. This is a enormous field and I'm not really good at "lists." But here are a few off the top of my head....
In the 19th century - As far as theory goes it I think Darwin's idea of natural selection upon heritable variation as the motive force behind the process of evolution is the bomb. If you read Origin of Species and Descent of Man you see just how fertile Darwin's mind was, and some of his ideas like sexual selection have only recently become the focus of research again.…
razib | January 16, 2006Heredity has two free reviews up, Quantitative genetics: Small but not forgotten, and Evolutionary genetics: Fight or flinch? New fields like genomics and evo-devo get a lot of press, and deservedly so, but I believe that the swarm of data generated by these disciplines is going to revitalize quantitative (biometry) and evolutionary genetics. Ultimately the natural sciences are fundamentally a unity. Even though quantum chemistry, molecular biology and ecology have their own domains of study and tools of the trade, there is a common ontological assumption, that of the physical world around…
razib | January 16, 2006I've made a few comments about inclusive fitness/kin selection that have expressed caution recently, but this paper in Molecular Ecology points in the other direction and reaffirms the power of W.D. Hamilton's theoretical framework. But one must remember that some of the review literature suggests that kin selection might have been a sufficient condition for the initial evolution of eusociality enabled by haplodiploidy, it may not be a necessary one for its persistence. The ideal model holds that since males are haploid, the coefficient of relatedness between sisters who share a father and…
razib | January 15, 2006Welcome. I suspect most of you have come via the previous iteration of this weblog. That variant continues, but I consider this weblog under the aegis of Seed a derived state which will offer up a different flavor. Alas, the launching of Science Blogs has caught me on vacation, so I haven't posted. That won't last long, but, for those of you who don't know me from my previous weblog, let me introduce myself. You know the pithy summary of my bio, as you see it on the right. Basically, I have a non-trivial, though not an exceptional (i.e., I'm not a doctor!) science education, and pay the…